Johnny Cash’s old house sits a couple of miles from where Josef Newgarden grew up in Hendersonville, Tennessee, close enough that a kid could ride a bike over and look at it. Now Newgarden drives race cars past Nashville’s skyline on Sundays that feel less like business trips and more like homecomings, and this weekend he returns to Nashville Superspeedway as the driver every rival is chasing.
Newgarden arrives at the Borchetta Bourbon Music City Grand Prix as the defending event champion, and the numbers behind that title reach far beyond one race. Over his nine-plus seasons with Team Penske, Newgarden has won 19 of the last 48 IndyCar oval races run, a 38 percent win rate that no other driver in the 25-car field comes close to matching. His last 11 series victories have all come on ovals. His most recent win on a road or street course dates back four years, to Road America.
A Track Built in His Backyard
Nashville Superspeedway sits roughly 30 miles from the house where Newgarden learned to love racing, and he has never hidden how much the location shapes his weekend. He was born at Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville and grew up idolizing the city’s country music culture from the inside, once joking after a win in St. Petersburg that he was “trying to build my brand as a Nashville guy, bit of a cowboy, guitar boots and some teeth missing.” A longtime Nashville Predators fan, he moved his offseason base back to the city years ago specifically to be closer to family, even while keeping most of his working week tied to Team Penske’s Mooresville, North Carolina, shop.
“I couldn’t be prouder to be competing in the INDYCAR series, racing for Roger Penske and now getting to do both on the streets of my hometown,” Newgarden has said of racing in Nashville. “It is a dream come true.”
He has also pushed back on the idea that his hometown owes him any special recognition. Asked about being honored at his old school, Newgarden waved it off: “I do not deserve a picture of me anywhere at a school in Hendersonville because no one would know what it means. There would be no significance to it.” That instinct, to credit the track and the sport rather than himself, runs through how he talks about Sunday’s race even as the record book makes the case for him.
From a Batting Helmet to a Racing Helmet
Before any of this, Newgarden was a third baseman. He grew up playing city league baseball at Drakes Creek Park in Hendersonville, moving between third base, center field and catcher, and rooting for the Yankees the way every kid on his assigned city team did. He attended Pope John Paul II High School rather than Hendersonville High, the school Taylor Swift, another Hendersonville product, once walked the halls of, and he missed his own prom, racing in England instead that week. “I wasn’t there a lot in high school because I was racing,” Newgarden has said of those years. By the time he had a shot at a full-time IndyCar seat, baseball was a memory he laughed about rather than a path he had followed, and he went on to win the series championship in 2017, the first of two titles he has collected with Team Penske. That path, a Hendersonville kid who traded a batting helmet for a racing one and ended up defending a title at the speedway closest to where he grew up, is part of why Sunday reads as more than a stop on the calendar for him.
The Numbers Behind the Nickname
Newgarden and six-time series champion Scott Dixon are the only two active drivers who have won an NTT IndyCar Series race at Nashville Superspeedway, a distinction that separates them from a field otherwise full of first-time winners at the 1.33-mile oval. Colton Herta won when the series returned to the speedway in 2024. Marcus Ericsson and Kyle Kirkwood won Nashville street course races in 2021 and 2023. Dixon himself won the downtown event in 2022, and three of his 59 career victories came on this specific oval, in 2006, 2007 and 2008, an average of nearly one oval win every single season across a 25-year career.
But it is Newgarden’s recent form that separates him from even that company. No other driver in the field owns anything close to his 38 percent oval win rate over the past nine seasons, and his last non-oval victory sits four years in the rearview mirror. Whatever changes Penske makes to setup or strategy elsewhere on the calendar, Nashville has become close to automatic.
A Field Chasing Him Down
Arrow McLaren’s Pato O’Ward arrives as the series’ hottest driver, having won the last two races, including the team’s first-ever 1-2 finish at Mid-Ohio on July 5. O’Ward has led nearly 32 percent of the laps run at Nashville over the past two years, 137 of 431, but has never actually won there. He finished second in 2024 and led 116 laps a year ago before a cut right-front tire ended his afternoon early. If Newgarden has a genuine threat to his home-track dominance, it is the driver who keeps leading laps and finishing just short.
Dixon, meanwhile, needs Sunday for a different reason. The six-time champion is riding his lowest stretch in years, five consecutive races without a top-10 finish, a drought matched only once before in his career, back in 2005 while running Toyota power. That earlier slump ended with a sixth-place finish, fittingly, at Nashville. Chip Ganassi Racing’s Alex Palou, who leads the championship by 56 points over Andretti Global’s Kyle Kirkwood, has raced at Nashville Superspeedway before but never won it, finishing second to Newgarden a year ago.
A Championship Chase Taking Shape Behind Him
Newgarden’s own championship hopes sit further back than his oval numbers might suggest. Alex Palou’s 56-point lead over Kirkwood, and a 94-point cushion over O’Ward, has made the four-time champion close to unreachable for anyone chasing the Astor Challenge Cup over the final stretch of races. Palou is guaranteed to carry the points lead into the BITNILE.com Grand Prix of Portland in August no matter what happens at Nashville. The math simply does not allow a single race to close a gap that large. For Newgarden, that reality has shifted the weekend’s stakes away from the championship table and toward something more personal: a hometown record he has built one oval win at a time, largely independent of whatever else is happening in the standings.
The timing also lands in a stretch when INDYCAR itself has leaned into off-track attention, with series stars Alex Palou, David Malukas and Felix Rosenqvist visiting the White House last week to promote August’s Freedom 250 Grand Prix in Washington. Newgarden’s assignment this week is simpler and, for a driver who has spent his career building a resume rather than a headline, more familiar: show up at the track closest to home and defend the record he has already built there.
Three Hundred Laps and a Point to Prove
Sunday’s race carries a wrinkle that could complicate Newgarden’s title defense before it even starts. Organizers increased the distance from 225 laps in 2025 to 300 laps this year, a 25 percent jump that pushes the event to roughly 400 miles, the series’ second-longest race behind the Indianapolis 500. That extra length means at least one additional pit stop and a strategy calculation every team on the grid has to solve fresh. None of them raced this exact distance at this track a year ago.
For a driver with Newgarden’s track record at Nashville, the added laps could simply mean more opportunity to put a car few can match even further out front. For everyone else in the field, from O’Ward’s speed to Dixon’s need for a turnaround to Palou’s hunt for a Nashville win that has eluded him twice, the extra 75 laps represent one more variable in a race where the hometown favorite has already answered every question anyone has asked him.
Sources:
- https://www.indycar.com/news/2026/07/07-16-nashville-nics-preview
- https://www.indycar.com/News/2017/12/12-01-Racing-Roots-Newgarden
- https://motorsports.nbcsports.com/2019/03/13/nashville-is-home-again-for-josef-newgarden-among-some-big-life-changes/
